airform archives

things related to sound, visual art, architecture, modernism, music, design, fluxus, 78's, literature, film, ephemera, and much more ...basically a space to share "the collection", much of which serves as inspiration for my work...

Tuesday, November 07, 2017

we're making inbetweennoise t-shirts with everpress....

here's an image of the inbetween noise t-shirts, we're doing with everpress.com

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

why justin turner is my favorite baseball player

The first question during a conference call with Turner was asking him why he hugged Marie, the elevator operator at Dodger Stadium.

“I hug her because she's a nice person, and she's in there every day. She takes us up and down the elevator,” Turner explained. “It's not a superstitious thing, or about winning or losing. It's because she's a wonderful human being and we enjoy seeing her every day.

“She's as much a part of the team as anyone else here. I try to treat everyone around here with just as much respect as I would treat Dave Roberts.”

Tuesday, August 08, 2017

a description of my mulhouse show -

The Kunsthalle Mulhouse hosts a monographic exhibition of the American artist Steve Roden from September 14 to November 12, 2017.

Steve Roden, visual artist and sound, develops a multifaceted work.He invented systems based on musical scores, words, maps, and prints, which then guided him to his plastic and sonorous works.The inspiring source material becomes a kind of formal skeleton on which finished work is constructed.

This exhibition will bring together these different forms of specific notations, as well as films, pieces and sound sculptures.Through this set-up, there are sets of visual and textual correspondences in which the representation of the sound is intrinsic to each piece.

Steve Roden creates a single space for various works echoing each other, thus sketching the partition of an experience of the sensible left to the interpretation of each.

Monday, August 07, 2017

solo show at mulhouse musem in france

Sunday, June 18, 2017

thinking once again of jack kirby's collages...

i recently found this 2013 text i wrote about jack kirby's collages, and figured i'd post it here...

in 2012 i heard that jack kirby made collages, and i was curious how a great draftsman would experiment in the collage medium... there's a lot opinions of kirby's around kirby's collages and those images were what got me back into comics (and a closer look at comic art - especially from the 1960's). it took a while to see one in person.

i know there is a bit of controversy about the value of these works - i don't mean in terms of money, but how do they fit into the king's overall body of work. some folks gripe that kirby slipped collages into the mix in books because they could be done faster than penciling a page (which i highly doubt), while others - such as myself - see them as kirby the artist , experimenting with a different kind of graphic language and effect; and i would say that the fact that he published collages sporadically throughout his career would be enough to suggest that they were not only important to his creative process, but also important to enhance his stories.. i.e. they offer another voice... and another level of story telling.

i think the collages were not only important to kirby's narratives and landscapes, and are essential part to his process overall vision - where found forms were used to make new forms throughe a different activity than drawing with a pencil.

when i turn the pages of a sequence of drawings, and find a world of collage detritus, the landscape offers an "other"... arriving as a shock, as a portal to another dimension.

the image above, was, i believe jack's last published collage, and one of his masterpieces of his use of the collage medium. it's a gigantic twice-up two page spread filled with complexity along with some very detailed scissor and hand work.

take a look at my friend's kick starter for a comic-con game, they are close to their goal... throw them a bone!!!!!!!!!!! they are getting close to being funded. it's going to be a hilarious wonderful game to play!!!!!!!

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

a new work in denmark... "a song for my father"

when i was 15, my father moved into a house designed by r.m. schindler. it’s a long story, but when my father bought his house, there was in a crawlspace under the garage, where we found 3 cartons of old domus magazines, something like 40 issues. (if you don't know the magazine, it was an architecture/design/art magazine started in the 1920's and is still publishing every month).

after my father passed away, i started to think about the magazines, and that over time, i kept looking through them, like a conduit between myself and my father - and these dirty, silver fish eaten, mold, mildew - i mean they were in really bad shape. some of the pages were falling apart, but i kept them as some kind of special material between myself and my father. 4 years ago, i decided to work more seriously with the materials attempting to converse with the materials in the hope to suggest "moves".

i began by making paintings of my father's house, and used various aspects of the april 1964 domus cover which was published the month of my birth. other steps were a series of small collages (in homage to joseph cornell's late collages). the next step was using pages of the domus magazines, towards temporary collages, sort of collages, and sort of videos... but there were100 short videos, using all the pages of the april 1964 issue.

when i finished with the 100 short videos i felt like i had climbed a mountain, and yet still, i kept mining the materials for promise.

when i was asked to make a "sound mark" for the installation in denmark, i wanted it to be outside, so that the process of dying would be palpable, while over time these images would change simply because of the weather and the poor materials.

so i pulled 65 pages from 1960's issues of domus magazines, each page with the text “this is a part of a song for my father" - plastered across the image.

in this way, i didn't want to manipulate the pages myself, but to simply allow a “patina of decay”.

ultimately, i placed the images in windows of a huge empty space, most likely a factory... and the pages were placed in various locations - existing like fragments of a stanza of a poem, or a score or a lost dog note... and each image a stepping stone, or a breadcrumb.

over time, the images will fade from sun and weather, perhaps in a way that all things break down, no matter how much they long to remain...

moholy-nag at lacma

holy cow - the moholy-nag show at lacma and the guggenhiem... was freaking amazing. the breadth of materials, ideas, genres, etc. someone opening his mind up to any thread to see where it might lead to... i loved so much his willingness to take a risk with an idea or a medium, covering abstraction and figuration... and always pushing. there was a lot of awkward works, funky approaches, and some wonderful works. here's a few that killed me...

Friday, June 02, 2017

soundpedro!!!!!!

soundpedro

june 3rd, 2017

RSVP on Facebook for soundpedro, a free event, taking place on June 3rd at Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro Ca. RSVP on Facebook is optional and not required for entry. No tickets are necessary for entry.

Soundpedro takes place on June 3rd 2017, 5pm to 11pm. Soundpedro is a sound art event at Angels Gate Cultural Center. Dress warmly and bring a flashlight.Map of the site

In 2013, 100 years after the release of Luigi Russolo’s Futurist manifesto “The Art of Noises,” the Long Beach-based art collective, FLOOD, presented its last SoundWalk. Just as Russolo’s seminal declaration strove to open new ways of perceiving, FLOOD pursued similar aspirations through SoundWalk, which created a platform to raise awareness of and appreciation for sound art. The event grew to include a mix of local, national and international artists, and the community experienced inspiring aesthetic sensibilities and approaches.

After ten years of producing SoundWalk, FLOOD believed it was time for a change. Deciding to expand beyond the aural towards more synaesthetic modes of presentation and perception, FLOOD began planning PUMP, a multi-sensory event coming in October of 2017, which will offer opportunities for cognitive boundaries to dissolve and senses to converge.

Following the final SoundWalk, however, sound artists and art professionals perceived a vacuum. They had lost a high-profile event that introduced mainstream communities to sound art, a form often relegated to the margins. In response, Amy Eriksen, Executive Director of Angels Gate Cultural Center, approached FLOOD with the proposition of starting soundpedro. Angels Gate is fertile ground for this endeavor. In 1998, the venue had initiated experiments in the area of sound that would move out of San Pedro and lead to the creation of the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS) in Los Angeles.

Monday, May 15, 2017

from soundhom....

Steve Roden

A Thousand Breathing Forms (7 Cd Box)

Over the last thirty years, Steve Roden has risen as a singular voice, attacking and advancing the highest challenges of the avant-garde - blurring the lines between nearly every creative field, moving outwardly toward the boundary with every day life. A visual and sound artist, his work spans the fields of painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, and performance. Following their brilliant box set of rare recordings by the artist from the period between 1988 and 2003, Sonoris returns with a second collection of his output between 2003 and 2008 - A Thousand Breathing Forms.
A pioneer of Lowercase music, a movement which uses amplification as a means to address the quiet and unheard sounds of objects and environments, Steve Roden is one of the great contemporary successors of John Cage. Looking beyond the shadow cast by chance and indeterminacy, he casts the ear toward a world indicated by the composer’s most original, radical, and often neglected idea - the value and beauty of the sounds of non-instrumental sources and of the every day. Through subtle intervention, he has illuminated the path for a rising generation of artist working in sound - refusing categorization, working as comfortably in a museum or gallery, as the contexts of music. Guided by rigorous conceptual perimeters and concerns, across A Thousand Breathing Forms the axis of Roden’s work snaps into view - the monumental presence of the smallest moment and sound.A Thousand Breathing Forms, which collects Roden’s unreleased and hard to find works from the incredibly prolific period between 2003 and 2008, is drenched in musicality. Centered around loop based works, it pulls relentlessly and democratically from a seemingly endless world of source - samples of records from an array of cultures, field recordings, instruments, object, and environments. It is a body of work, which, for being birthed electronic process, appears stunningly organic - steeped in humanity and touch. A world of intimacy. The discrete at a towing scale. A realm to be inhabited, which burrows deep - taking residence in the ear. As it sounds, resonances, and structures intertwine, Roden appears as a vision of the future, and a bridge to the past - a breaking of dogma, and a reconciliation for the schism betweenMinimalism and the conceptualism of Cage. A world guided by ideas, presenting the profound beauty, meaning, and importance of sound, across its six CDs, A Thousand Breathing Forms is a revelation - a lens into the practice and work of an artist of incredible significance, as much as an opening to the larger field. Capturing and advancing some of the most important and difficult ideas of the last hundred years with elegance, accessibility, and grace, this is a collection which promises to grow over time and at every turn.

STEVE RODEN

Note: This super limited edition 7" will be lathe cut to order and will only be available for 7 days. It will never be released by Champion Version on this format again and we will only make as many copies as are pre-ordered. Orders shipping out within 28 days of being placed. Limited to one copy per person/household.

Description: The four tracks here where recorded live using the same analog modular system Roden employed for the 'For Observers In Aircraft: Part 1' recordings. And of course they continue very much in the same vein. Not only are the small details significantly distinct on 'For Observers In Aircraft: Part 2', but like those on the aforementioned 7", tones punctuate, ripple and undulate until they more closely resemble drones. And if you listen closer, certain tiny frequencies emerge and flutter increasing in mass before resettling. Between these sections, the interaction of tones is just sublime. Wonderful.

i will be selling at thet Downtown Modernism Show of Sunday, April 30th, 2017: Los Angeles's best marketplace for vintage modern design.

very excited to share a booth with my friend richard chartier at the los angeles modernism show april 30th. i will be selling a lot of ceramics, books, arts and architecture magazines, eames toys, russell wright, eugene deutch, rare design books, margaret de patta photographs of her jewelry, george nelson flatware, nelson outdoor tables, paintings, a paul laszlo watercolor, a frank lloyd wright bench with original cusion, nelson/girard vanity and more...!!!!!

We invite you to take part in our next Downtown Modernism Show of Sunday, April 30th, 2017: